Because he tells them it’s okay to be those things.
I keep thinking about what my nephew said at Thanksgiving shortly after the 2016election. He worked with a bunch of “blue collar” Maga types & to him their narrative seemed to be:
“Ah, at long last, I can finally stop pretending to be a halfway decent person.”
And it might seem confusing — how can the evangelical Magas be doing this, giving a sigh of relief & just admitting they’re terrible people — and that’s where the religious right rhetoric comes in.
The religious right, by characterizing their fight against civil rights for LGBTQ people and women as a matter of “morality” has given evangelical Magas the perfect cover for their misdeeds.
They can ignore the murder of **actual** children under DJT’s policies by telling themselves over and over that they just care so very, very much about the “murder” of hypothetical children.
After years of rhetoric that their church is “under attack” evangelical Magas can justify any evil committed by DJT in the name of “protecting” the church.
Evangelicals have a hard time believing that anybody turns away from their church because of the intrinsic qualities of the church — because it’s morally disgusting or meaningless or overly political or toxic or any of that.
So a decline in incluence, numbers, money, status, etc., all of that must be coming from some outside entity ATTACKING the church, and this is what DJT is going to “protect” them from.
How is he doing this, exactly?
He’s protecting their right to enact cruelty and take political power — the absolute worst aspects of the church.
He’s protecting their right to enact cruelty and take political power — the absolute worst aspects of the church.
So now they’re in a feedback loop. A political power structure that feeds the most toxic aspects of the church, increasingly attracting those who want that and turning away anyone who might want something different from their faith.
The irony is that, when this is all over (one way or the other), there’s not going to be much of a church left.
That’s why it’s important to #EmptyThePews NOW. It’s a death spiral either way, but the sooner we end it, the less damage it does.
